MTG?

[Violence]

Foresee!? Run that card! It's insanely good. I don't wanna sound like a blue addicted control player like shapenaji, but that card belongs in your deck.

Life gain decks are uncommon, if there's a life gain deck, then you might just wanna switch your whole plan over to poison.

Well, if you're going to run Poison, you'll want better poison cards, the ones that just win on their own, and proliferate cards. It's best to stick to one strategy, instead of diversifying. Chained Throatseeker, Blighted Agent, Plague Stinger, Necropede, the black Souleater, Necropede, Corpse Cur, Core Prowler, to name a few.... Viral Drake is a beating.

I just wanted to know because counters and removal are more important in 1v1 than they are in multiplayer, where they're primarily used defensively.

[shapenaji]

One thing I am curious about is why you don't like the infect cards. I tried to get all of the blue/black infects that I had to put into the deck, because the people I play with sometimes have crazy life cards that keep giving them life. The only way I've won so far is by poison (though, that time it was 1 vs. 1).

Infect can be nice, but a lot of the non-infect creatures just have better utility. In constructed they'll just have answers for all your creatures. (Unless you're playing the glistener elf, blighted agent turn 2 win decks...),

Blue-Black infect can work though with Phyrexian Crusaders and Inkmoth Nexii.

In general though, unless you specifically build for it, it's a bit too slow.

[shapenaji]

Also if you're playing multiplayer, and want to do poison, you're probably better off with a blue-black proliferate style deck. Run ichor rats, give everyone a poison counter. Run treasure mage to grab contagion engine, thrummingbirds... Everflowing chalice, surge node, enclave cryptologist.

god, thrummingbirds must be amazing in multiplayer, just hit the vulnerable guy.

[Kirby]

Foresee!? Run that card! It's insanely good. I don't wanna sound like a blue addicted control player like shapenaji, but that card belongs in your deck.

Life gain decks are uncommon, if there's a life gain deck, then you might just wanna switch your whole plan over to poison.

Well, if you're going to run Poison, you'll want better poison cards, the ones that just win on their own, and proliferate cards. It's best to stick to one strategy, instead of diversifying. Chained Throatseeker, Blighted Agent, Plague Stinger, Necropede, the black Souleater, Necropede, Corpse Cur, Core Prowler, to name a few.... Viral Drake is a beating.

I just wanted to know because counters and removal are more important in 1v1 than they are in multiplayer, where they're primarily used defensively.

Yes, it is foresee. I looked it up online, and that's exactly the card. I have at least two of them.

I see what you mean about the poison, now. It's not that you were against poison, but just that I don't have that great of poison cards right now. Proliferate cards to go with poison certainly make sense.

The guys I play have many decks. I have the lowest number of cards of any of them, so it's hard to predict what their strategy will be. It just seems that life-giving cards have been a trend, lately.

Although, one guy played a mean combination the other day. It was a strategy to remove the cards in your deck, and the combination of cards he we had thought was an infinite loop, but later looked it up and found out we were wrong: when a player discards a card, they lose (some number of... I forgot how much) life. And then mindcrank (which, incidentally he got from me in exchange for mystical tutor).

We thought that taking a card from your library to your graveyard counted as discarding, but it seems that it is not a discard unless it comes from your hand. Still, he seemed to have a good "card-draining" deck.

By the way, out of curiosity, is foresee always a good card for blue, or do you think it's beneficial for some reason due to the combination of cards that I have put together?

[Kirby]

Also if you're playing multiplayer, and want to do poison, you're probably better off with a blue-black proliferate style deck. Run ichor rats, give everyone a poison counter. Run treasure mage to grab contagion engine, thrummingbirds... Everflowing chalice, surge node, enclave cryptologist.

god, thrummingbirds must be amazing in multiplayer, just hit the vulnerable guy.

I don't have any of these cards, I think, but this sounds cool.

[Violence]

Oh, he tried Megrim/Liliana's Caress + Mindcrank? Silly. He should be trying Bloodchief Ascension + Mindcrank. That's a true infinite. Just hard to get online.

If you can tell what deck each player is running by the different colored sleeves they use(assuming they sleeve), one way to create some variety and give yourself a fighting chance against their different decks is to make a sideboard of 15 or so cards so that you can swap cards in and out of your deck in between matches to give you a better chance.

[Chew Terr]

One thing I am curious about is why you don't like the infect cards. I tried to get all of the blue/black infects that I had to put into the deck, because the people I play with sometimes have crazy life cards that keep giving them life. The only way I've won so far is by poison (though, that time it was 1 vs. 1).

While Infect is definitely game-changing (some might say -breaking), I don't think it's great unless you can focus on it fairly hard (say, 2/3 of your creatures-ish? Less, if you have equipment that makes creatures infect). The reason I say this is: imagine that you do half and half. Half your damage goes to poison, half to life. Assuming your opponent cannot remove counters or heal himself/herself, your opponent is at 10 life, 5 poison. This is unfortunate, as your opponent would be dead if all of the damage had been either infect or non-infect. In effect, while poison's a great way to win, you might shoot yourself in the foot if you diversify too much.

-Keep in mind, I don't play much and don't know what I'm talking about.

(unrelated tangent) p.s. When I was a kid, my favorite card was Pirate Ship. Tims were just so cool. Man, I used to be a jerk... oh, wait.

[Violence]

Foresee basically says that for four mana, you get to take away any bad cards out of your top 4, and either draw two good ones from the remainder, or one to two fresh cards. It does what Blue wants, which is get rid of dead cards and get card advantage. It's hard to ask for more. I wouldn't play it in standard, but in multiplayer, where the action is slower, Foresee is a good way to refresh a poor hand into a much better one.

I played an EDH game with a guy whose general was Skeleton Ship, and he play it out, but had no islands. Took me a sec to notice, but it was pretty hilarious.

These days, all the pingers are white. Prodigal Pyromancer Reprint, and of course there's Spikeshot Elder, Bloodshot Trainee, and Cunning Sparkmage. Back in Alara, there was Blood Cultist, and Vithian Stinger.

[Violence]

Jace and Stoneforge banned?! Whoa... first banning in standard since Ravager Affinity...

What're you going to play now? Is Valakut just going to take over?

[shapenaji]

Thank god... I mean seriously, those 2 cards basically destroyed the meta.

(Now a lot of people are sitting with Absurdly expensive decks they can't get rid of though, I do feel bad about that)

I'm looking forward to my blue architect ramp, with SFM and Jace out of the meta, I think I can roast some foos

[Violence]

I'm gonna try out GR Pod, Turn 1 Birds, Turn 2 Fauna Shaman, Turn 3 Shaman pitching Vengevine for either Priest of Urabask or Superion, whichever I don't have in my hand, but have the other of, then play Priest into Superion, recur Vengevine. Big game!

[Kirby]

Trying out my first "booster draft" tomorrow. I'll let you guys know how it goes.

[Kirby]

Well, I had written a rather long entry describing what happened in detail, but the post was lost when I had to re-login.

I'll give the short version of the story:

I didn't perform that well. There were four rounds, and I went 0-2 for the first three. The third guy I played gave me some tips, and I won the first game of the last round. But then I lost the next two games.

I asked people for tips after I played. I basically had two comments from different people:
1.) One guy said I spent too much time thinking. I need to know the cards better, he said. In my game against him, we ran out of time, and they gave us each 5 turns. We didn't run out of turns (though I don't know what would have happened if we had).

2.) Another guy said I needed to trim my deck down to 40 cards. I had been using something like 52.

My main strategy in the tournament was to get a lot of poison and flying cards in the draft. Flying cards were part of my strategy because I figured not many people would have them. Poison cards were ones that I wanted just because I want more poison cards.

I went blue-black for colors at the tournament.

The most effective creatures that I had at the draft were the unblockable ones. The game I won was due to these. However, I only had three in my deck.

All in all, I had a pretty good time, and got some interesting cards. Playing in the tournament was just a plus (though I lost).

---

Oh, and the other thing I found interesting at the tournament was that most of the people there shuffled their hand constantly while playing (not the library, but the cards in their hand).

I guessed this was so people couldn't guess the distribution of the cards in their hand.

[CSamurai]

Drafts are really hard. Once, I knew enough to do draft selection, and could select strategies for any colour of card, but it requires a lot of research and actually caring. These days, when I can be bothered, I make theme decks. The last thing that interested me was a sphinxy artifact creature deck in Alara using the broad range of sphinxes. For a theme deck, it actually did fairly well, but I didn't find anything in the next block to like, so I fell out again.

I miss it sometimes, it is a surprisingly deep game, in spite of the crazy schedule they've moved into. I think the breakneck pace of expansion release is one of the things that keeps me from getting back into the game. Unlike the Old Days (I started playing Waaaaayyyyy back in the Dark. 1994. So long ago) the pace of release seems to have risen sharply sometime around Ice Age.

This makes it hard for me to stay interested, when the deck I've spent time tuning and pruning is worthless almost as soon as it's completed, when the new block comes out. Yeah, I can keep using the old deck for another year or so, but the 'new hotness' is almost always hard to compete with without resorting to the new cards. Granted, this is all standard, I suppose I could play limited or freeplay, but I like a little more structure in my play.

Anyway, I miss Magic, but it's always such a huge money dump for me.. I don't miss it enough to keep playing it.

[Kirby]

...

Anyway, I miss Magic, but it's always such a huge money dump for me.. I don't miss it enough to keep playing it.

I can see how this would be a problem. I can't say I've spent a TON of money so far, though. I paid 20 USD for a deck builder kit, and then 12 USD for the booster draft. Other cards were given to me by people I play against at work (I did make two trades, as well)...

So I guess that makes about 32 USD plus tax that I've spent so far. I'd better be careful not to raise the ante too much.

The good thing is, I'm inexperienced enough that I feel that there is still a lot for me to do with the cards I already have. In other words, I haven't tried out all strategies, yet, so there's still a lot of time for me to try different compilations of the cards that I already have.

If I become really experienced, I might have the desire to buy more cards, but for now, the number of cards I have already is too much for me to process optimally.